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“TRYING TO SAY THE IMPOSSIBLE”

So, I haven’t written much lately. Not on the blog, not on my poetry, although I’ll admit to having written about 300 emails in the past few days; however, it’s not for the lack of thinking about it–though I’ll admit I didn’t try too hard either. Tonight I had a moment of exhuberance, the urge to write a blog post after reading a thoughtful post on Brenda Schmidt’s blog about the long poem/short poem from a SWG session this fall. Funny thing is, after reading Brenda’s post I was certain I had written down exactly what Kroetsch had said, but after re-reading my notes, I wasn’t so sure anymore. It wasn’t until I had re-read the notes, and began to write this post about what I thought I knew that it began to click. In my notes I wrote: “failure of the long poem—not like this” (and I underlined “like this”). And tonight it really registered, how I thought I knew at the time what he was saying, and I wrote what I knew, thinking then that I knew what he meant, but in the end, it was/is impossible, because I don’t have it. And that’s what he was saying. The moment we have it is the moment it slips away, and we fail. But, I’m comforted by the simple fact that we “dare to fall off the page.” And that keeps us going.

thanks for the peek at your notes! that must have been a great session! I’ve been accumulating material, etc. for a long poem and your notes have inspired me as well. I’m sure glad I know you and Brenda.

You wrote: “The moment we have it is the moment it slips away, and we fail.” So it is with dreams, too. If I awake with a dream remembered and fail to write it down…it slips away. I’ve enjoyed checking in! Happy New Year from North Carolina USA!

Been thinking about all this, and here’s a novelist’s reply. The only way to say the unsayable is to not say it, but to say something else: to show it, to make the reader think what can’t be communicated. The reader has to be led to drink of the pool that can’t be fathomed. How?

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“Take warning from all those times when on meeting again, we feel ashamed because we realize we had accepted the false simplification which absence permits, its obliteration of all those characteristics which, when we meet face to face, force themselves upon even the blindest. Where human beings are concerned, the statement ‘nothing is true’ is true—at a distance—and the converse is also true—at the moment of confrontation” --Dag Hammarskjold.